Weekly Review
Jacob Blake—a black man who, according to his family, had moved from Evanston, Illinois, to Kenosha, Wisconsin, “for a fresh start,” and was shot in the back seven times by the Kenosha police—was shackled to his hospital bed for several days as he lay in critical condition.1 2 3 A 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse traveled from Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha with a medical kit and an AR-15-style rifle to protect businesses from demonstrations that were spurred by Blake’s shooting.4 “Part of my job is to also help people,” said Rittenhouse; he later shot and killed two protesters and wounded a volunteer medic. The College Republicans United, a student group at Arizona State University, began raising funds for Rittenhouse’s defense, saying that he “does not deserve to have his entire life destroyed”; Kenosha police officers arrested Antifa members who had traveled from Seattle to bring free food to protesters; and Facebook deleted a page called “Kenosha Guard,” which had been frequently reported for promoting armed vigilantism.5 6 7 “It was largely an operational mistake,” Mark Zuckerberg said about the delay. During the 94th day of protests in Portland, Oregon, a convoy of Trump supporters fired paintballs at demonstrators from pickup trucks, and a supporter of the far-right group Patriot Prayer was shot dead.8 9 In Oklahoma, a man who shot a woman in the back after she pulled down one of his Nazi flags pleaded self-defense.10 On the first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention, President Trump told a woman that her “blood is very valuable.”11
Reports emerged that the Department of Homeland Security had considered using a “heat ray” on migrants to appear tougher before the 2018 midterm elections.12 Weeks after an official vote to keep a Confederate monument in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the statue was toppled by Hurricane Laura.13 The federal government agreed to pay South Carolina $600 million and clean up weapons-grade plutonium stored in the state, 17 years after it had promised to do so, in exchange for halting all lawsuits about the extant nuclear material.14 Q please, mr. president, make germany great again! Q, read one pro-QAnon sign at a march in Berlin against coronavirus restrictions.15 Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, said that he had been having surgery while the Centers for Disease Control discussed new coronavirus guidelines that were later approved.16 Maine’s Bates College asked students returning to campus to sign liability waivers acknowledging their risk of death, and nearly 600 cases of COVID-19 were confirmed at college campuses across Virginia.17 18 Liberty University staff and alumni called for more prayer after it was reported that the wife of Jerry Falwell Jr., who resigned as president after it was revealed that he had paid to watch a man have sex with his wife, had also had sex with a then-22-year-old student.19 20 When asked to comment, Falwell said that it was “better to leave at the top” and quoted Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.21 A study found that atheists sleep better than Catholics and Baptists.22
The Russian Army unveiled camouflage robes for military priests, and Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny remains in a coma after being poisoned by a toxic nerve agent.23 24 The doctor leading Russia’s coronavirus response attributed Navalny’s sickness to a self-inflicted overdose, the head of the country’s international broadcaster ascribed it to a case of low blood sugar that could have been avoided by eating chocolate, and President Trump announced that he would be “looking into it.”25 26 Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro told a journalist that he wanted to “smash your face in” after being questioned about a series of mystery payments to his wife by a corrupt former police officer.27 In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a Congolese man and a Pakistani national were detained and questioned about an unidentified flying object that had landed in the jungle; the object was later revealed to be a Google internet balloon.28 Chinese makers of wax Donald Trump statues reported a coronavirus-related decline in business, and the Missouri House of Representatives passed legislation to allow giving children guns without parental permission.29 30—Ani Wilcenski
